Tiny Sandford

It is man vs machine in Charlie Chaplin’s beloved classic and his final film featuring his famous tramp character.

Carpenters drive to and “work” at a planing mill. Relying heavily on pantomime (Stan speaks only 24 words!), as well as violent but unhurried slapstick, this rates as one of the team’s finest shorts. When fans wrote to Laurel late in life and asked for recommendations, he would often say BUSY BODIES and TOWED IN A HOLE. Curiously they were made within a year of one another, and have the same tructure — Laurel & Hardy, dressed in overalls, start out in an open car, driving to work, where their construction labors are unsupervised nonsense, and they wreck everything, including their even-then antique flivver for the finish. Directed by Lloyd French. With Charlie Hall.

A little tramp accidentally falls in with a down-on-its-luck circus and his acrobatic and comedic skills start drawing audiences to the big-top in droves, but not without a bittersweet brush with romance for the gentle clown.

Developed as a two-reeler spoofing prison pictures, the project grew into Laurel & Hardy’s first feature film at Roach. For years, their popular shorts were billed above the feature attraction on theatre marquees, so, at last, they appeared in a full-length movie themselves. Imaginative individual set pieces are among the fellows’ funniest and most endearing, including a prison-school sequence meant to echo the shorts being made by Our Gang at the time. Listen carefully early in the picture when someone in the crew cannot help himself and laughs off-scene! This is an extended version, restored to reflect what the motion picture looked like during its final preview stage. Directed by James Parrott, who along with Hal Roach makes a gag appearance as a prisoner. With Wilfred Lucas, James Finlayson, June Marlowe (OUR GANG’S “Miss Crabtree”) and Walter Long as the “The Tiger. ”